Fittingly, it’s January 6 as I write that Jan. 6 tribunal betrayed the privacy of at least 2,000 Americans by releasing their Social Security numbers online, a move that a government official described as “inadvertent.”
Of course, it’s hard to believe it was “inadvertent” when most of the people whose numbers were released were Trump officials and supporters. According to the Washington Post, three members of the former president’s cabinet, a few Republican governors, and numerous Trump allies were among those whose information was contained in a spreadsheet.
This latest privacy invasion comes after Democrats on the then-lame-duck House and Ways and Means Committee voted to release six years of Trump’s tax returns in December. In the words of lawyer Joseph Welch in 1954, “Have you no sense of decency?”
While the spreadsheet with the numbers was taken down Wednesday, the high-profile nature of the people whose data was exposed probably puts them at an “elevated risk” because the information would be especially useful to intelligence agencies, said James Lee, chief operating officer of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit organization that advises victims of identity crimes and compromises.
Lee recommended that people listed follow common tips for victims of identity crimes, including freezing their credit, using a multi-factor authentication app for their online accounts and setting up credit and account monitoring.
Making matters worse: those whose privacy was invaded were not told about the breach, so they had no reason to believe they were compromised:
“To my knowledge, we were not notified. The governor was not notified,” said Ian Fury, a spokesman for South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R). Social Security numbers were listed alongside the names of Noem, her husband and her three children.
I wonder if new CNN senior political commentator and former committee crymaster Adam Kinzinger has anything to say about this “danger to democracy”? Paging Liz Cheney.
Other names whose private information was thrown out into the public include Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R), and former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar (also, shockingly, not a D).
The Jan. 6 Committee was a disgrace the day it started, with Kinzinger (R-IL) and Cheney (R-WY) preening for the cameras next to Adam “Shifty” Schiff (D-CA) and committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) as they hyperbolically tried to convince the American public that they were doing great work and saving the country.
The truth is, no serious person believes the riots were worse than Pearl Harbor or 9/11, as some people actually claimed, or that the mighty US government was ever in any actual danger of being overthrown. In the words of our least-favorite fabulist, “c’mon man!”
Even if there were some issues to be investigated, however, the Committee lost all legitimacy before its first hearing when then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi broke precedent by vetoing then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s choices for the committee, Representatives Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio. Any sense of bipartisanship or fairness was thrown out the window in one fell swoop.
The ”inadvertent” release of thousands of Social Security numbers is just another stain on the legacy of the kangaroo committee.